For months, I've kept this notebook by my bedside in hopes to write. To empty my noisy brain in the morning before heading into a new day. To look back in the evening and underline the nice things that I appreciated on that day.

Yet, it's still empty. Only a pen keeps its company on the shelf.

Have I forgotten about it? Not really. It's there, within my sight. I wake up and see it. I go to bed and see it.

Has nothing happened? Do I have no time to stop and write? Quite the opposite. Plenty of things and plenty of time at my disposal.

The truth is simpler: I have no clue how to start.

It's not a novel idea. Both physical and digital shelves in my spaces are full of notes and scribbles, be it about my day and how I feel or my observations and thoughts on things around me.

But I wanted to do it better. Like a ritual to start and end the day. (I've seen so many people do that! How wholesome and thoughtful they look. Like they have it all together. The tiny magpie in my head is obsessed with the shine of these routines.)

Do I draw up some kind of structure? Do I leave questions for myself? Do I... freestyle?

And here I am, paralysed with how to do this thing. (What an irony.)

Indeed, how could I do this thing? My socials feed is screaming at me with all the ways to DO things. Start a business in this way, NOT this way. Post every day but not every day, maybe every second day. Do this, not that. Do that, not this.

I wanted to run away and throw my phone, to rid myself from all this advice-giving preachy stream of curated consciousness from other people. I wanted to hear my voice. And the notebook's blankness was ready to hear me at last.

I didn't care anymore how to write, I just wanted to do it.

The moment I laid it out in writing – the things I could do (yes, even about how to journal) – my voice broke out, like a little grass seedling on a pavement. At last. Welcome home.